


Mad at you for something

by Gwenno



Category: A Redtail's Dream (Webcomic)
Genre: A Redtail's Dream, Dreams, Gen, aRTD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 08:32:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11271795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gwenno/pseuds/Gwenno
Summary: Paju knows that she is mad at Hannu for something. She keeps trying to figure it out in her mind, but each time she's certain that this possibility is the right one, doubt creeps back in, and she just can't remember what it is. Whatever he did, Hannu's not going to get away with it!





	Mad at you for something

**Author's Note:**

> A response to a prompt provided for the aRTD week 2017 by Keeper
> 
> "Paju knows that she is mad at Hannu for something. She keeps trying to figure it out in her mind, but each time she's certain that this possibility is the right one, doubt creeps back in, and she just can't remember what it is. Whatever he did, Hannu's not going to get away with it!"
> 
> I'm not much of a writer so this was very challenging to do, but I gave it my best shot and am quite proud of it and hope that people have fun reading it.

_Hannu!!!!, school, squirrel, Ville, nose bite, mailman, fox_

Paju looks at the small list, hurriedly scribbled in her own hand with frustrated confusion. A vaguely Hannu-directed feeling of anger bubbles below her surface.

This had not been the first time she’d woken up, written similar notes, and promptly forgotten why. It had been happening for weeks now, and she couldn’t for the life of her explain it.

Putting the new note alongside the rest she started arranging her bag ready to go to work. It didn’t take long. Paju always prepared as much as she could the night before, although this morning she did add a fresh canister of coffee and some dried fruits. It was going to be a long day, and she knew from experience that she was going to need the energy. As an afterthought, she folded up that morning’s note and put it in her pocket.

Ready to face the world she stepped briskly downstairs (stopping briefly to adjust an askew painting of her brother), and was mildly surprised to come across that very devil eating his cereal in the kitchen.

The surprise was built on years of habit and had little recent justification. As a child, Tuomi had despised mornings with a disturbing passion, sleeping though any attempt to drag him from his blanket-clad lair, and visiting dire revenge on any who dared disturb his rest. Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, it had gotten much worse. Paju had on one occasion dumped a bucket of cold water over his head to wake him on one of her more annoyed mornings. Neither had forgotten this.

Nowadays, he woke around the same time as she did if not earlier, ate breakfast and was out of the house an hour before he needed to leave for school. To add to this strangeness, she once thought she’d seen him sneak out with a whole cabbage.

“Off early to cause trouble, are you?” She asked blandly.

“Shut up.” Came the regular cereal-muffled reply. He pointedly did his best not to look at her.

“You know, I *will* find out if you’ve been doing drugs, or stealing things. You might as well confess to whatever to save me some troub-”

“Go away!” The tissue box missed her by a hand’s width as she dodged.

Neither surprised nor particularly angry, Paju sauntered towards the door. Calling out in an offhand voice “Be sure to pick that up before you leave.” she closed the door behind her. There was another thump from the inside, but that was all.

 

***

Paju rested her hands in her coat pocket as she briskly made her way to school. Spring was on its way, but the early morning air was still bitterly cold and her breath glowed faintly with the lights of the occasional street lamps. Taking a left, and continuing on her usual route she made her way towards the Kuikka bakery. Happily, she thought that she had timed her morning perfectly, and the clock in the window of the post office confirmed a few seconds later. There would be twenty minutes to enjoy her breakfast, a brief walk to work, and then another fifteen minutes to organise everyone’s jobs for the day. A typical Tuesday.

“Joona! Jonna! Is anyone at work?” The twins were often in the back so early in the morning, helping to prepare the morning’s bread. She tried yelling a little louder. “Joona! Jonna! Are you…”. A protesting Hannu was shoved so hard forwards that he hit the counter. She could almost feel the breath being knocked out of him and involuntarily winced. His eyes quickly shot daggers at the muffled giggling coming from the kitchen and then he turned to face her.

Her face pinched in a slight frown. She specifically chose to come to the bakery on Tuesday because Hannu would definitely not be there. Previously, this had been because she hadn’t wanted to eat the charred mess he called baking, but recently, she’d found herself annoyed at him in general. Very annoyed.

“Hannu.” She said in frosty greeting.

He groaned in reply and Paju heard a fresh batch of giggling from behind the kitchen doors. She glared at it and the laughing promptly sputtered and died, followed by the distinctly louder than usual sounds of the bakery kitchen filling the void.

Keeping her composure despite the growing need to shout at someone Paju took out her purse and started counting coins.

“Isn’t Tuesday supposed to be a day off for you?”

This garnered a response at least.

“It is,” Hannu replied, dripping self-pity. “My free day, and here I am, stuck! Forced to slave away behind this counter and interact with other people. Why do I subject myself to this?”

A little irritated, but now but with a faint flicker of curiosity rising, Paju takes the bait and asks, cautiously “Why *are* you subjecting yourself to this? You never come in on off shift days. Everyone knows that. Last time Mr. Kuikka asked, you literally ran out the door screaming and covering your ears.”

There is a pause of a few seconds, as Hannu dejectedly slumped onto the counter once again, but with Paju’s gaze becoming more steely, he picked himself up and finally answered.

“Ville has a cold today. It was supposed to be his shift, but he couldn’t make it so I said I’d go instead.”

Paju was a little taken aback by this.

“Ville is sick?” Is he okay?”

Hannu nods absentmindedly. “Yeah, yeah. I told him to just call in sick, but nooooo. He didn't want to let the old man down after he’d given him a job and everything. He was planning on just going to work and sneezing over everything until I told him I'd take over. Bloody nuisance. Joona and Jonna could have managed the bakery just fine by themselves.”

“Huh, I guess they could,” Paju said, confused. She felt her anger ebbing. “That was actually really nice of you. Care to tell me your ulterior motive?”

Hannu uncurls himself a little with affronted dignity and raises his hands loosely above his head.

“Why does there always need to be an ulterior motive? Maybe I’m just nice? You’ve been on my case for weeks now. What is your problem?

Paju starts to reply and then stops. She *had* been on his case, hadn’t she? Well, it was probably his fault, whatever it was! She could feel her anger seeping to the surface again, and her cheeks flushing red with it.

“My problem right now is that at this rate I’m going to be late to school. Give me two buns to go, and so help you if you’ve managed to burn this lot.”

For a second it looks like he might argue, but then he lets it go and goes to fetch her buns. Unlike her, Hannu had never been confrontational. She paid, left, and walked into the snow without another word.

 

***

Unnecessarily kicking any icy blocks which were somewhat in her way, Paju wondered at her behaviour recently. True, she had been telling Hannu off for years for various misdemeanours, but there was almost always a reason. Why was she angry at him now? As she cracked a satisfying frozen puddle she thought back on the night where she thought it all started. The party to watch the Northern Lights. They had been talking, she thought, or maybe she was running tasks, it was a bit fuzzy, when all of a sudden she’s felt this huge sense of displacement, to be quickly surpassed by an intense and sudden Hannu-directed anger. The twins had suggested that she was angry that he skipped out on the festivities, which was true but also not quite right. That had also been the night Hannu’s friend Ville had come to town. That at least, made Paju smile. Ville was a nice guy, and despite her possibly unjustified anger at Hannu, she was glad he had a friend like that he could relax with. It almost made that borderline psychopath seem human, and that made her happy. Despite everything, Hannu was her friend, and strange as it may be, she was fond of the guy. Then she remembered the notes she’d been writing each morning and she frowned. The rest of the way to school she was quiet.

Organising the daily schedules of the school staff wasn’t part of her official duties, but after a week of seeing nobody buying milk for the teacher’s lounge, worksheets not being photocopied for science class, and dirty containers with paintbrushes in them being left overnight after art class, she had taken it upon herself to save off catastrophe. Nobody had been able to stand in the way of her tirade of organisation. Today in particular, however, she really needed for something to be organised. Even if it was just the class lunchtime schedule. She looked at her pocketed note and sighed.

The teachers came to school, and then the students. In that time Paju had managed to organise everything to her satisfaction and was on her second cup of coffee.

The morning was blessedly repetitive, and she was able to spend most of it with the older children. They were apathetic, but also low maintenance. The local wildlife when being caught by Ms Lehtonen wasn’t exactly riveting, and although she was supposed to be “assisting”, she found herself rummaging through some old textbooks in the back. There sure were a lot of wildlife nearby for Ms Lehtonen to talk about. Maybe Hannu had shot something again? Looking at the page on foxes she felt a sudden wisp of deja-vu creeping behind her eyes.

_Hannu!!!!, school, squirrel, Ville, nose bite, mailman, fox_  
  
The note burned in her pocket.

  
***

She was sent to help out with the youngest class for the last period of the morning. The class she had been shadowing earlier were going to have music, and the teachers were all very aware of how little Paju contributed to, or liked that particular subject. The children she was sent to supervise were preparing painting materials when she came in, and Paju felt a sense of dread at the impending mess.

“Not paints again.” She mumbled to herself, drained already.

This class was as eventful as the previous class had been boring, and Paju found herself running from one end of the room to the next trying to avoid disaster. She cleaned up spills, provided paper towels and did an awful lot of telling the children off for creating such messes. There seemed to be a preference for painting squirrels amongst a lot of the children (or at least she presumed that was what the drawings were meant to be) and all of a sudden she was annoyed at Hannu all over again. Had he been calling her squirrel hair behind her back again? If she had heard that, she would definitely have been pretty annoyed. No, she thought after a pause. That wasn't it.

“Look at this.” Said one boy in the back, proudly showing his red-splattered paint blob masterpiece to his friends. “I did Miika getting bit on the nose by a squirrel, like that time. See, all the blood coming out everywhere. I even did his nose about to be ripped off and he’s screaming and crying. Squirrels are so great!”

There was a chorus of impressed humming from the surrounding kids. It was indeed very good. A perfect representation of that time. Paju beelined for the conversation as soon as its smatterings reached her ears.

“Miika was bitten by a squirrel?” She asked cautiously. “When did that happen?” Paju couldn’t tell why, but she felt this was very important to know

“‘Unno?” Said the child with the picture. “Some time back maybe?” There was a chorus of shoulder shrugging from his friends. Despite everyone agreeing that the picture captured the moment well nobody could remember exactly when it had happened. Paju was about to press the issue but her voice was drowned out by the clamour of the school bell signalling lunch.

***

Nobody noticed that Paju was distracted that day, such was her self-control, but as the students left for home, and eventually some of the teachers started to pack up to follow, she could feel that her mask was beginning to slip. She had felt pressed by this sense of wrongness for weeks now. Weeks of waking up to stupid nonsense messages, of being angry at her friend and of not knowing why. She felt she had no control, and for Paju, this was worse than anything else the world could lay at her door. She looked at the message again

_Hannu!!!!, school, squirrel, Ville, nose bite, mailman, fox_

What did it mean? Why was she writing this, and what was her subconscious trying to tell her? Every time she felt like she was getting somewhere, it seemed to slip just beyond her reach again. Was there really anything there at all? Maybe she was just overworked and stressing out over nothing?

With a sigh, she checked the time on her phone. Five minutes to go. She looked at her hands. She looked at her note from the morning, and then she looked at the newer collection of tangled scribbled that constituted her thought process in that last hour. There were a lot of things there, and she was getting so tired of this. She was tired of being angry. Of being confused. She was tired of not knowing why she woke up each morning and thought it was of the utmost importance to write those same words.

_Hannu!!!!, school, squirrel, Ville, nose bite, mailman, fox_

Two minutes to go. She packs her things and leaves work early for the first time since starting the job. Nobody bats an eyelid. Only Paju knows.

It is early, but the sun is already setting as is usual this time of year. Her eyes glaze over a little and her feet lead her left.

  
***

  
She had known the house since her childhood but realises with sudden shock that it must have been at least a year since her last visit. The doorbell is still broken, so she knocks, hearing excited shuffling from inside almost immediately.

Ville opens the door with a big grin and a pack of tissues. Hannu wasn’t lying about the cold, Ville looks awful. Despite that, his already permanent smile broadens to cover his whole face when he sees her there.

“PAJU!” Paju, come in! I’m so happy to see you!”

“It’s nice to see you too Ville. How are you feeling, Hannu told me you had a cold?”

For the first time, Ville seems to register his box of tissues.

“Oh, yes. But it’s okay. I think it will go away soon. It isn’t so much fun being home by myself and I’ve been sleeping on the sofa and watching things on the television, but I’m happy you’re here. It’s so much more fun to be around people!”

This actually gets a laugh out of Paju.

“You are the complete opposite of Hannu. I don’t know how you both manage to get along so well.”

Ville seems to ponder at this, and then just shrugs. “Hannu is grumpy I guess. I don’t really mind that, but I guess he is.” Quickly changing his train of thought he adds “Are you coming in then? Please say you will! It would be so nice to talk.”

Paju laughs again. “Okay, but only for a little bit. I just came over to check that you were okay and that Hannu was taking good care of you while you were sick.”

He leads her to the living room and they sit there in slow conversation. The room was a little messy but better than she’s expected. Ville made it easy to relax, and Paju was glad for the chance to talk with a friend.

“Hey Paju.” says Ville after a while, “Are you angry at Hannu?”

Paju was a little taken aback by this.

“I’ve been angry at Hannu for most of his life.” She says truthfully. “Did he say anything?” she adds with genuine shock.

Ville looks down at his feet

“No, you can tell me. I promise I won’t get mad. Did he say anything to you Ville?” Paju pleads.

He looks down at his feet a little longer, but eventually, he answers.

“Not much. Just little things. I think it’s been bothering him lately though. I think he noticed that you’ve been grumpier around him. I’ve noticed too. You’re much grumpier than you were before.”

Paju is so shocked that she doesn’t even register what Ville means by the last part. For all her frustration at him, somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that Hannu would actually be *bothered* by it. Hannu was never bothered by anything except for the prospect of making an effort. He cared not at all what people thought of him

Not often at a loss for words, Paju finds her tongue quickly. “I’m sorry Ville. I didn’t notice. Did I upset you too?” Although she hadn’t known him for long, she found it easy to talk honestly with Ville. She had found it the same way with his predecessor - “Dog Ville” - as he was now called.

“Oh no, Paju! You’re not upsetting me! Don’t be sad Paju!” Paju laughs at his earnestness

“Oh Ville, I’m fine,” Paju reassures him. “I’m just a little stressed lately.” She looks at his trusting face and takes the note out of her pocket. She hadn’t shown them to anyone since she started writing them.

“Hannu, school, squirrel, Ville, nose bite, mailman, fox…” She reads

Ville’s eyes widen, but Paju is looking down and doesn’t register.

“I’ve been writing this same list down first thing in the morning, every morning for weeks now and I don’t know why?” She confides. “It must be important if my sleeping brain insists on documenting it on a daily basis, but it makes no sense? What does it mean? All I know is that ever since I’ve started waking up to this I’ve also been way more annoyed at Hannu than usual.”

Ville looks pale, and then promptly sneezes into his hands. He grabs a tissue and wipes it off hurriedly.

“You write that every morning?” He asks incredulously

“Yeah. Maybe not word perfect, but the gist of it is the same. Do you have any idea what this means?”

“Well, I…, I guess maybe…, It could be…” Ville is very flustered by this, and flails about with his answers “Mailman and squirrel? That’s what it says?”

“Yeah. Ville are you oka…” Just at that moment the front door clicks open and Hannu’s voice rings down the hall

“Ville! I’m home! I brought hot dogs if you’re hungry.” Hannu strolls into the room and dumps his bag on the floor, before seeing Paju. He jumps back.

“What are you doing here?!?” He shouts indignantly.

Equally indignant, Paju replies “I came to visit Ville. You said he was sick and I thought he’d like company.”

Both stared at each other for a moment before Ville chips in, his voice gentle.

“Hannu? Paju told me an interesting thing you should know. I really think you should see this Hannu.” Both look at Ville, Hannu with confusion, and Paju with mild concern. She was worried what Hannu would think of the list.

Ville shows Hannu the list and he looks at it. He looks some more. He then looks at Paju and his eyes show borderline panic, as thoughts seem to flit behind them like birds.

“Oooookay! Well we’re very grateful you came over and saw Ville, but it’s getting late and I think it’s time we all retired to bed. Goodbye.”

He plonks her coat over her shoulder, and confused, Paju is unceremoniously ushered out.

“Hey now!” Paju shouts just as the door is slammed in her face. She growls as she hears the locks turn. “HANNU!

She bangs on the door but to no avail. That guy could be such a jerk! It was as obvious to Paju as the door in her face that Hannu was keeping something important from her. Something she had a right to know. She felt the ember of determination at her core flaring. There was no way she was letting him get away with keeping secrets from her. She would find out what this was about whether he liked it or not. Face creased in thought, she stomped back home.


End file.
